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Online Web Chat Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the spider-talk-over-the-grapevine dept.

frooyo asks: "I have been looking for sometime now to add the functionality of web chat to my website. I have been having difficulty in finding free (open source) software that allows for a moderator and N number of registered users to chat on my website. These projects look promising, but we'd like to know what others are out there. What do you use on your website for web chatting?"

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. It all depends. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    On what functionalities you want. Probably one of the most full featured would be the Ethereal Realms., although, it's probably far beyond what you need/ want (and system intensive, from what I've heard from people running it).

    It's more of a chat system, than simply a chat room.

    Code http://sourceforge.net/projects/ethereal-realms/
    Website: http://ethereal-realms.org

    And yes, it's released under the GPL

  2. If... by hookedup · · Score: 2, Informative

    You've got no problems with using php/mysql for this, check out hotscripts.com php section. Lots of free (GPL) scripts there for you to try out.

  3. CGIIRC by FinestLittleSpace · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/ is a brilliant IRC > web client, and is massivley customisable, as well as having a very very helpful creator/developer who'll respond to your needs. Try it.

  4. chat systems by Eric'sGoddess · · Score: 4, Informative

    Personally, I use Aerial Chat(configured on my site: http://www.cataromance.com/chat/xindex.php -- the project: http://freshmeat.net/projects/aerialchat/). It's the one I settled on after trying out at least a dozen others. The problem that I've found is either they're difficult to set up or they don't work on everyone's computer. This one has a safe mode for older browsers. What I'd really like to see in a chat is the ability to moderate the chat when we have a guest speaker. Still waiting for that option. If anyone knows of a good one, let me know! :)

  5. PHPMyChat by jptechnical · · Score: 3, Informative

    PHpMyChat comes with CPanel which is an extremely popular web hosting management package, so you might have it available and not even know it. PHPMyChat is also freely available and totally customizeable. After editing the css files I was able to make the window very small and nearly borderless so it is very lowkey for my wife whose boss treats all the employees like children.

    You can create users and private rooms and and all kinds of other stuff. Just type /help for a popup window with commands and instructions.

    --

    Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
  6. Re:HTTP is just not a good chat protocol. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    you wind up having to have some kind of timeout mechanism that refetches the web page every second in order to get decent interactivity
    ----------------
    That's just in a theory. In practice, a lot of browsers (IE>2, NN, Mozilla, Opera>6, Konqueror, even links) support 'stream'-mode (actually, it's just a html-rendering during downloading). So user connects to the server and than retrieves new content (f.e. new chat-messages) without any refreshes. Server just doesn't close a connection but writes new content in it. Not in RFC, but works :)
    sorry for my english